Kevin McLaughlin is a multiple USA Today bestselling author of science fiction and fantasy novels, with over eighty books published. He believes in giving back to the writing community that helped him out during the early days of his career, so he uses his experience to boost others. He has been a speaker at Boskone, Dragon Con, the Nebula Conference, 20Books London, and many other events. A skilled public speaker with experience in education, McLaughlin sees it as both pleasure and obligation to pass along to others the skills he has learned, so that the chain of people helping people continues unbroken.

The Coffee Break Novelist by Kevin McLaughlin

We all have twenty four hours in a day, 365 days in a year. And in theory, how we spend that time is entirely up to us. In practice? Not so much! I bet you find that most of those hours are filled in for you. We have childcare, and work, and food prep, and bill paying, and housework, and yard work, and myriad other tasks that eat up bits and bites of that precious time, until there is very little left.

Many of us have trouble finding the time to brush our teeth more than once a day - fitting in a novel, too? It looks too big. Looms too large. It's a mountain of a task, and there seems to be no way to confront something that will chew up that many hours in the small bits of time we have available. In this book we'll address that lack of time, and we're also going to look at the novel as a set of smaller bites. By the time you are done, you will have all the tools you need to finish your novel - to fit that important work into your already busy life.

Are you tired of not having the time to accomplish your dream of writing a novel? Have you written a book before, but it took forever, and you don't know how you'll ever finish the next one? This book is for you.

 

REVIEWS

  • "This book focuses on how to write in the little time you have daily, and I love it for that because that's what I find myself doing a lot of times. I like that he mentioned various ways to pull off such feats, such as including voice recognition and using programs on your phone. That was pretty neat."

    – Amazon Review

  • "My $.O2? Doesn't matter who you are, or how good at this game you are. There's value here."

    – Amazon Review
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

Who wants to write a book?

Lots of people. In fact, surveys have shown that something like 80% of the US population wants to write a book. That's a huge number of people – many millions of them! And of course, that's just in the United States, which is a small slice of the overall population of would-be writers worldwide.

Since you're reading this, I'm going to work under the assumption that you're one of those people.

Do you want to write something just for yourself? For your family and friends? Do you plan to self publish, or submit the work to a publisher? That's all up to you, and other writers have addressed those decisions at enough length that I don't feel like I need to rehash those things here.

But before you can make any of those decisions, you have to write the book.

Finding time to get the work done is challenging! A novel is a huge undertaking. It's a work of at least forty thousand words of fiction, but most are much longer. How do you find the time and energy to get all of that writing done?

What we're going to look at in this book is how to get your book done, in lives that leave little time for extras. I'm going to talk about fiction specifically, although many of these techniques can be applied to nonfiction – and indeed I have used the techniques outlined in these pages to write this book!

You decide what you want to write about, and what you want to do with it after.

I'll show you how to fit your writing into your already busy life – how to be a "Coffee Break Novelist".

Writing in the Time We Have

We all have twenty four hours in a day, 365 days in a year. And in theory, how we spend that time is entirely up to us. In practice? Not so much! I bet you find that most of those hours are filled in for you. We have childcare, and work, and food prep, and bill paying, and housework, and yard work, and myriad other tasks that eat up bits and bites of that precious time, until there is very little left.

The essential stuff really can't go. You can't pay the bills without going to work, for example. And you can't maintain a family or a home without taking care of the dishes, or whatever other chores you have to get done at home.

And so most would-be novelists never write their books, because they "don't have time". They simply cannot figure out how to add anything else in. Many of us have trouble finding the time to brush our teeth more than once a day – fitting in a novel, too? It looks too big. Looms too large. It's a mountain of a task, and there seems to be no way to confront something that will chew up that many hours in the small bits of time we have available.

So what we're going to do here is address that lack of time, and we're also going to look at the novel as a set of smaller bites. Both aspects are important! Without finding blocks of time in which to work, we'll never get the words on paper. But without breaking the novel down into manageable chunks, we can feel too daunted by the prospect of writing.

So take this book a step at a time. Read each chapter, then implement the plan outlined there. Feel free to tweak things a bit – every writer is different. But try not to skip any steps. Read the sections more than once, if you need to.

Then, do the work.

Nobody is going to make you write your book – except you. What you have in your hands are instructions and tools. It's up to you to take them and do the work of writing your book.

Work the plan, and you too can get that novel completed!